27 Facts About Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke was born on August 12,1936 and is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York City.

Hans Haacke studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960.

In 1959, Hans Haacke was hired to assist with the second documenta, working as a guard and tour guide.

Hans Haacke was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker, draftsman, and painter.

From 1967 to 2002, Hans Haacke was a professor at the Cooper Union in New York City.

Hans Haacke made forays into land art, but by the end of the 1960s, his art had found a more specific focus.

In most of his work after the late 1960s, Hans Haacke focused on the art world and the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders; he often underlines its effects in site-specific ways.

Hans Haacke has been outspoken throughout his career about demystifying the relationship between museums and businesses and their individual practices.

Hans Haacke writes, "what we have here is a real exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored".

Hans Haacke believes, moreover, that both parties are aware of this exchange, and as an artist, Hans Haacke is intent on making this relationship clear to viewers.

In 1970, Hans Haacke proposed a work for the exhibition entitled Information to be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, according to which the visitors would be asked to vote on a current socio-political issue.

The proposal was accepted, and Hans Haacke prepared his installation, entitled MoMA Poll, but did not hand in the specific question until right before the opening of the show.

Hans Haacke's question commented directly on the involvements of a major donor and board member at MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller.

Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1,1971, Hans Haacke took on the real-estate holdings of one of New York City's biggest slum landlords.

At the John Weber gallery in New York, in 1972, on two separate occasions, Hans Haacke created a sociological study, collecting data from gallery visitors.

Hans Haacke requested the visitors fill out a questionnaire with 20 questions ranging from their personal demographic background information to opinions on social and political issues.

In 1975, Hans Haacke created a similar piece to the Manet project at the John Weber gallery in New York, exposing the history of ownership of Seurat's Models.

In 1978, Hans Haacke had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, that included the new work A Breed Apart, which made explicit criticism of the state-owned British Leyland for exporting vehicles for police and military use to apartheid South Africa.

The clear implication, supported by Hans Haacke's remarks, was that these two figures were attempting to roll back their respective nations to the socially and politically regressive, laissez-faire, and imperialist policies of the 19th century.

Hans Haacke has had solo exhibitions since, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

In 1993, Hans Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik, the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Hans Haacke tore up the floor of the German pavilion as Hitler once had done.

At the 2000, Whitney Biennial, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Hans Haacke presented a piece that is a direct reaction to art censorship.

In 2014, it was announced that Hans Haacke would be installing one of his works as part of the annual Fourth Plinth commission in 2015.

Hans Haacke's winning commission of a bronze sculpture of a horse's skeleton, titled Gift Horse, comes with an electronic ribbon tied to its front leg that displays a live ticker of prices on the London Stock Exchange.

Burnham points to Hans Haacke's joining the Arts Workers Coalition and the boycott of the Sao Paulo Bienal in Brazil in 1969 as catalyst for the artist's work to take a political direction.

Hans Haacke first published a book about the ideas and processes behind his and other conceptual art called Framing and Being Framed.